


Life

by peasncarrots



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Bit sad actually sorry, PTSD, Set in 83 and 84, Trauma, What-If, but can be taken that way, not a romantic thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-05
Updated: 2020-05-05
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:55:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24015535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peasncarrots/pseuds/peasncarrots
Summary: What would happen if Mike witnessed Will's disappearance?
Relationships: Will Byers & Mike Wheeler
Kudos: 11





	Life

**Author's Note:**

> Had a dream similar to this so I had to. Not much went into it as you can tell ;-;

Mike Wheeler is in seventh grade, he’s thirteen, and twelve months ago yesterday he went out to the woods to hide the love letter he wrote to Jane Hopper hoping that the emotions themselves would be left with it at 5:06 pm and unintentionally watched the end of Will Byers. 

It was cold and wet and the longest he had ever went without breathing. In the fog, Mike stood on the softened ground by a tree. The thoughts of the dead bird on the patch of moss near his shoe were gone. He remembers now with guilt that spoils his stomach like maggots that he was more concerned about himself than Will. He thought that he’d missed the needle by a thread. 

Will never screamed. He didn’t ask for help, their eyes never met. He may have whimpered, but in the end, Mike isn’t entirely sure he can rely on his memory, considering he can’t even comprehend what really happened, he can only see the remains of the pictures that played on the insides of his eyelids. The pictures that were dense in detail and stayed with him for weeks like an illness that could not be cured. 

It was tall when it stood, much taller than them. It didn’t have a face, but it had teeth, and its mouth opened up like a flower. Some kind of terrible flower that you might step on if you saw growing. 

The air smelled like minerals, like the earth – the last Will would know of it. Mike’s lips were chapped and his jaw broken, his eyes hard and wide, and you could have watched the horrible scene progress if you looked into them. The birds were quiet. 

He didn’t understand it. He didn’t understand it. 

This was comic book stuff. This was spielberg stuff. 

There was this stifling difference between them though, something that put all of the films and stories to shame, something that threw them to the wind and stomped them into the dirt, something that made it feel like there was a glass wall separating them and this. The difference was that Mike could watch and read them over and over again, he could know everything there was to know about them, but they would still get boring. This would never lose its novelty. It would never become unable to torment him. He would never forget it, and whenever solitude plays its withered eternal hand he’ll never convince himself it isn’t real. 

He’ll never swallow how the most he knew about Will was his name. 

Will Byers will morphe into the kid that never got to grow up. The kid that nobody was ever able to find out what happened to. The kid with the childless mother. The kid that sits on Mike Wheeler’s shoulders everyday with a weight so opaque to press quiet reminders into his ears without the next breath he never got to take. 

It’s you. It’s you. It’s you. You. Why didn’t you help me? 

He remembers dinner two days after it happened. 

His mother is making him do the dishes because his older sister is out. The kitchen is very silent, and his nerves have settled. 

“Mike, hon, watch the knife.” 

Mike pauses. “Okay.” 

She hovers for a moment. He doesn’t like it. His mind goes back to the woods. 

He turns to her, meeting her eyes. He tells his stomach she’s just assuring herself he’s washing them right, so she won’t have to do them all over. 

“What?” 

She breathes out, face hardening, eyes going to the tile. His heart plummets. 

“Do you remember the boy from your class?” 

“There’s plenty of boys in my class, mom.” 

She frowns at him. 

“And I have more than one class.”

“Will Byers.” 

Mike looks at the soap in the sink. He goes cold and still, and the air in the kitchen solidifies. “Yeah. He hasn’t been in school.” 

A beat. His mother breathes in. “Apparently he’s gone.” 

Mike makes his brows pinch. He begins running the dishcloth over the blade of the knife. “What d’you mean? D’he run away?” 

“Did he?” 

“How would I know?” 

“Weren’t you friends with him?”

“I don’t think so.” 

“Micheal, this isn’t funny.” 

Mike drops the knife back down into the sink. “I’m not laughing!” 

His father’s don’t yell at your mother comes leisurely from the dark of the living room. 

He holds her eyes. He shouldn’t have the audacity that he does. He shouldn’t believe she has no right to accuse him of withholding information. 

She looks at the counter. “If it was you I hope she would be doing the same thing.” 

Mike’s insides turn blue. 

“I know y’ don’t know everybody. I told her I didn’t think you’d be helpful. I just wanted to make sure that wasn’t a lie.” 

That’s the first time he cries about it, because it’s a mutual problem now. Now it’s out, it’s spread, it’s only going to get worse. His stomach rots when they start sending out the searches, and it still hurts when they fail. 

When the anniversary comes, he doesn’t think it’s intentional. They want to make a film about it. It’s supposed to be authentic, supposed to be a true story. He tells them he’d like an audition and they make him sit in a room with all the other kids that apparently said the same thing. 

The dude that’s providing the summary – as if Mike doesn’t know the substance – talks over the thunderstorm that forced him to shut the blinds and turn all the lights on. Mike doesn’t listen to what he says. One of the kids has a panic attack like a dog hearing fireworks and boss man has to take her to the office. 

The door shuts behind them, and Mike stares stalely at a piece of dust on the desk they sat him at. 

“This is stupid.” He says. 

The kids look at him like crippled birds. 

“They just come in here with their script and just decide to try an’ make everyone believe that’s how it happened. They didn’t even know him. They’re not even from here, they probably read about it in the paper and thought, huh, can we make money offa’ that?” He pauses. “Now all of a sudden they care. Nobody used to care. They pretended for two weeks and then gave up.” 

Mike gets up and goes to stand near the windows. “It’s gonna be this production, and they’re gonna have fun, and somebody’s gonna win an award, but why? Why? What does it accomplish? Awareness? So that people’ll pay more attention to missing person cases? For how long?” 

“Well then…” They don’t get it. They’re just listening, staring, they’re not understanding. 

Mike’s hands shake. 

Somebody has to say this. 

“Well then great. But here’s the thing – you could disappear, I could disappear – right now – but next month, they'll go back to worrying about Christmas decorations, and my mom’ll still be looking for me everywhere, even in places she already checked. She can stand on my grave but she won’t stop until she knows I’m in it.” 

Mike’s eyes burn. His throat is tight. “And you know what the sad thing is? She’ll never get it. She won’t ever think it’s too late to find me. They will. She won’t.” 

He breathes in. “So what does this do? What does this help? The only thing this does is tell people they never found him but what fucking good does that do if it’s already too late!” 

A beat. Mike scrubs at his eyes. He doesn’t care anymore. 

When he goes home that night, the power is out. 

His older sister puts on some movie she likes and he sits with her and watches until he falls asleep. 

It feels like days before he's there again. In the mud, eyes like clocks. 

The air is full and smells like rain, the trees are tall and skinny, the leaves don't crunch, there is no sound, not even from his heart. 

His skin warbles and his stomach and heart cry in alien languages that have rupturing currents of dread rather than words. 

And then it starts. 

Will lies on his back, breath like a million dying men, soaked down to his bare skin in rain, walking the verge of death in untied, worn shoes as the devil itself shrouds him with inhuman trills. 

The wind doesn't blow, the earth is still and lifeless and everything is too clear. 

Mike repeats history. Mike watches. 

He sees the hole in the tree and with trembling hands and muscles made of fiberglass, and he watches Will Byers understand that it's about to kill him. He watches Will Byers lie still and wait to die. 

And Mike screams. He wants to make it go away, he wants to scare it back to wherever it came from, he wants Will to watch it die. 

He comes with nothing to fight with. One hundred and one pounds and blunt fingernails and teeth that aren't quite right. Tears in big warm eyes and dirt on his shoes, ready to ruin his new coat and be winded for a change. 

Mike is ready for it to be different. He knows he won't win, he’ll be bitten and clawed and he’ll bleed into the grass like a heavy river, but he’ll lie in Will’s place if it means he saved me. 

If Will can live with a hero instead of dying hopeless, Mike won. 

It does bite him, but it doesn't hurt. When he's placed himself between the monster and the boy it chose as prey, it doesn't hurt. 

His fingers dig into the dirt above Will’s shoulders and his knees by his ribs. It cuts into his back and Mike cries, but Will's eyes are green. Green like moss and frogs and the short, dewy grass he lies on. 

Green like life. 

He stares up into Mike's face, confused and afraid and stunned and terrified, eyes watery like puddles. 

“You needed me.” Mike tells him, but it's hard to say. His throat is tight and full. Will cries silently, eyes wide. “I'm here.” 

Mike breathes in the best he can, but there are holes in his lungs. Will says nothing. 

Then, the monster leaves. It dissipates. 

Mike lies beside Will. Will, who sits up. 

“Can you just lay with me?” 

Above them, the leaves rustle, they shouldn't, it's November, but they are full and alive and they breathe gently. 

Will lowers himself onto his back. Mike feels his warmth. 

Together, their hearts beat. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you and I hope I tagged this correctly.


End file.
